On Trump’s dog whistling to neo-Nazis:

Why Americanism is the incorrect response to fascism

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By Daniel K. Buntovnik, 17 August 2017

A political dog whistle: “a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others” [x].

Donald Trump sent a loud and clear whistle to his doggish packs of fanatical far-right supporters in a speech delivered on August 12th, 2017 regarding the wave of violence set off the day before in Charlottesville, Virginia by a rally which drew a historic number of fascist bigots espousing a jumble of neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, “alt-right”, and “white nationalist” genocidal and segregationist ideologies. (Given the name which organizers gave to the rally, one of its main raisons d’être, in addition to preventing the removal of monuments to the Pro-Slavery Rebellion, seems to have been to overcome these rather insignificant ideological discrepancies among adherents of right-wing politics in the United States of America). The most notable violent incident occurred when a member of a contingent of left-wing, anti-fascist protesters named Heather Heyer was killed [x] and a number of others injured by a neo-Nazi terrorist using a muscle car to plow into the counter-protesters. The attacker has been identified as James Fields, who was photographed before the attack standing in formation with a right-wing gang calling itself “Vanguard America”, wearing the group’s Donald Trump golfing outfit-inspired uniform, and holding a shield with the group’s emblem, a Celtic cross made of two crossing fasces, thereby combining two well-known symbols of neo-fascism into one [x]. Vanguard America is, in turn, a member group of a larger umbrella organization called “Nationalist Front” (formerly known as “Aryan Nationalist Alliance”) which brings together a variegated panoply of Klan, neo-Nazi, and Christian Identity groups.

Caught in the center of the above photograph is the white supremacist James Fields. Despite a contradictory attempt by the Nationalist Front sub-group Vanguard America to disavow the neo-Nazi terrorist [x], “Commander” Jeff Schoep of the “National Socialist Movement” and founder of the Nationalist Front, issued a statement confirming James Fields’s belonging to the Nationalist Front camp by retweeting a video of the terrorist attack which showed anti-racist activists rushing to the weaponized muscle car which had just been used as a murder weapon in an effort to render it inoperable and thereby prevent further racist, anti-leftist killing. In the retweet, Schoep issued his own statement in which he said “Antifa attacking car [i.e., the terrorist murder weapon] with ball bats. This is what we faced in Cville, armed antifa, & city allowed it,” [x] (my emphasis). In using the phrase “This is what we faced” in this context (a video of Fields “allegedly” running over participants in an anti-racist demonstration in his car), it can be confirmed that the Nationalist Front leader views the murderer as part of his group. In addition to this, the neo-Nazi leader demonstrates an incredible level of hypocrisy in criticizing anti-Nazi counter-demonstrators for being armed with bats, given the well-publicized images of right-wing, paramilitary-style militias armed with assault rifles which were out in force for the “Unite the Right” rally [x].

Despite the fact that the nature of the conflict playing out in Charlottesville was clearly that of supporters of genocidal fascism versus their opponents, Trump adamantly attributed guilt for the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” to “many sides”, emphasizing the words “many sides” by pausing to repeat them a second time in an insincere fashion [x]. While a number of Democrats and “liberals” criticized Trump for failing to identify the guilty party by saying some words along the lines of “radical white nationalist terror”, many in the Democratic Party actually echoed his dog whistle endorsement of American-style fascism by making appeals to “national unity” and “American values” [x].

By fixating on Trump’s lack of explicit condemnation of the neo-Nazi and Ku Klux groups at the expense of paying the slightest attention to Trump’s exploitation of the Nationalist Front terrorist attack as another opportunity to promote more American nationalism, those whose “opposition” to Trump is superficial set up an easy out for him to redeem himself and atone for his “mistake” by fulfilling their wish and making a short pronouncement in which, after repeating in paraphrase what he had already said two days earlier, he said, “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans” [x]. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump made and has fulfilled an explicit campaign pledge to continue the Obama era practice of killing people for nothing other than the blood in their veins, i.e. the kindredness of their blood to that of stigmatized individuals [x], here Trump really only condemns the hate groups insofar as they “cause violence” and behave criminally. This is not a condemnation of the KKK, neo-Nazism and white supremacists and their existence as such (i.e. their right to organize and operate in society), but merely empty words against their illegal tactics, which are inevitably attributed to the infamous figure of the “lone wolf” (as if these “lone” wolves were the only “bad apples” amongst the otherwise upstanding members of the neo-Nazi community). Even American liberals such as Glenn Greenwald continue to defend neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates, so long as they don’t “cause violence” and employ legal methods of struggle, despite the fact that laws in a number of other liberal bourgeois democracies proscribe things such as the use of Nazi symbolism, Holocaust denial, and hate speech [x]. This shows that there is bipartisan support for the legal status of neo-Nazism, which is not a given, even within the confines of bourgeois democracy.

Despite Trump’s tepid condemnation of the neo-Nazis’ illegal tactics and bipartisan support for neo-Nazism’s “right” to fester upon society, on August 15th he spoke publicly about Charlottesville for a third time, arguing that the “alt-left”, a made-up term which serves only to draw a false equivalence between the political Left and the the far-right [x], shared responsibility for the terrorist attack on leftists in Charlottesville [x].

Shortly after the August 14th comments about “criminals and thugs”, Trump went on to say, “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our Creator. We are equal under the law. And we are equal under our Constitution.” This is patently false, since Trump’s 90 day travel ban on citizens of six Muslim-majority countries, now halfway expired, hinges on the argument that not all human beings are to be treated equally by the U.S. legal system and Constitution. Once again Trump has rhetorically marshalled the citizenry with Nationalist ideology. This is at a time when his regime appears to be making good on its promise to outdo the previous record-holder, Obama, in effecting more deportations of alien “Others” from the United States [x]. The boilerplate platitude about the U.S.A. being “a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal”, lifted from the Declaration of Independence, is practically meaningless in this context, since chattel slavery outlasted this declaration by almost a century. The phrase “We are all equal” was as incongruent with the real situation of 1817 as it is with the reality of 2017, when so many of us are denied access to basic human rights, treated unequally by the law, and forced by lack of freedom from want and fear to perform unpaid surplus labor during much of our waking hours.

A sober analysis of the facts will reveal that there can be no combination between “Americanism” and anti-fascism. This “anti-fascism” which bases itself on Americanism is ineffective at best, and it is its own form of fascism at worst. I call it the right-wing of “anti-fascism” because, in contrast to the left-wing of anti-fascism, which calls for a multinational revolution against fascism and the conditions themselves which produce it, the right-wing (pseudo) “anti-fascism” calls for liberals (falsely identified with the political Left despite belonging more to the center, in proximity to the Right) to combine with conservatives in a sick display of “national unity”.

What right-wing “anti-fascist” commentary which continues to rhetorically marshal the national “we” (the quintessential subject of fascist reaction) fails to take note of in Trump’s initial response to the deadly Nationalist Front attack in Charlottesville is that it is not merely his “failure” to identify the bigoted antagonizing party to the conflict which is significant, but the way in which Trump’s speech whistles to right-wing dogs, and carries forward their ideology of American nationalism. And by wallowing in Americanism, the would-be opponents of Trump remain tethered to the fascist body, like a gangrened limb.

Expressions of this all-American “anti-fascism” appeared to rise up organically on Twitter, where #ThisIsNotUS became a trend [x]. Not long after that, an anti-“Alt-Right” meme modeled on a World War II era poster featuring the character “Uncle Sam” appeared and began to spread online. This image is worth discussing, as a brief analysis of it will begin to demonstrate that the nationalism of Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and centrists and moderates is much closer to the nationalism of the Nationalist Front terrorists than it is to antifascist internationalism.

“Uncle Sam” is of course a personification of the United States and the first thing that stands out about him, besides his striped pants and starred vest, is his whiteness, made overwhelming by his pure white hair. Clearly this symbolic representation of a nation embodied in an individual human being conveys something about the artist’s idea of what “kind” of human being is “typical” or representative of that nation’s hundreds of millions of people. As one writer puts it, “Political cartoons” were (and still are) a reflection of the perceived “racial conditions of a society” [x]. So right away, Uncle Sam is an expression of white nationalism.

Even more problematic is the fact that this particular version of Uncle Sam has been lifted from a World War II era poster which features the racial slur “Jap”. The anonymous(?) creator of the “Stop the ‘Alt-Right’” poster has even kept the same style of bold red lettering at the top of the poster and calqued the “We’ll finish the job” into “We’ll beat ’em” at the bottom, so you know where the inspiration came from.

Uncle Sam has a checkered history of being used to promote the exact same racist demands that neo-Nazis and “white nationalists” demand today, demands like booting out racially othered immigrant populations, treating the “white race” as superior to others, and building an “Imperium” on top of annexed foreign lands.

This image from 1899 shows Uncle Sam as a disciplinarian schoolmaster. The Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba (territories annexed by the United States during the late 19th century) are represented by racist caricatures of dark-skinned children. Colonialism was often justified by the alleged need to bring “civilization” to the “child-like races”. The white children sitting behind them are studious and the names of states are written on their books, showing that they represent the American states which by that time had become predominantly populated by white settlers. The text on the blackboard reads in part, “England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not. By not waiting for their consent she has greatly advanced the world’s civilization. The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.”

We have sampled just two out of the many Uncle Sam images with strongly white nationalist messages which have been produced over the years, but I think this is enough to understand the point. More white nationalism is not a good response to the “white nationalism” which manifested in Charlottesville. (Note: I place scare-quotes around this term because, like “alt-right”, it is merely a re-branding of white supremacist groups long understood to be of a neo-Nazi nature, made in an effort to improve their public image).

Yet another expression of this pseudo-antifascist All-Americanism in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville began to propagate itself in the online spheres, where it was “liked” by hundreds of thousands of people and probably seen by many more, when someone decided that those who think their own American nationalism to be of the “good” sort would get a kick out of seeing a clip from a 1947 U.S. military propaganda film called Don’t be a Sucker.

In the particular scene which went viral [x], we encounter a character who is meant to be an “obvious” fascist. He’s standing on a soapbox, addressing a small crowd, railing against the quadruple scourge of “Negroes”, “alien foreigners”, “Catholics”, and “Freemasons”. In the crowd we see two men in particular who are listening to him. One of them is later revealed to be an immigrant from Hungary and the other, a natural-born American.

The “native” American nods his head in agreement with everything the fascist says until eventually the latter starts railing against Freemasons.

“Masons? What’s wrong with the Masons? I’m a Mason. Hey, that fella’s talking about me,” the man says.

“Before he said ‘Masons,’ you were ready to agree with him,” the second man says.

“Yes, but he was talking about–What about those other people?” the first man says.

Next, and here we get to the “antifascist” climax of the clip, the second man explains, “In this country we have no other people, we are American people.”

Now compare the “We have no other people,” message of Don’t be a Sucker with what Trump actually said on Saturday the 12th day of August 2017, after a Nationalist Front neo-Nazi had just committed a murderous terrorist attack directed against left-wing individuals standing up and demonstrating against racism and fascism:

“No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country. We love our God. We love our flag. We’re proud of our country. We’re proud of who we are. So we want to get this situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. We want to see where we’re going wrong as a country” [x].

The message from the 1947 U.S. military propaganda film (“We [Americans] have no other people,”) is exactly the same as that which Trump had conveyed by rhetorically marshalling “we” as the national subject in his first response to Charlottesville. Not “we” as in human beings. Not “we” as in opponents of fascism as such. But “we” as in citizens of the U.S.A. “We” as in unquestioning participants in mindless ritual displays of flag-worshipping patriotism. Trump’s boilerplate nonsense about “no matter our color, creed, religion or political party” might sound superficially inclusive and unbigoted to a simpleton. But by excluding nationality, Trump is already excluding the alien “Other” and marshalling the nationalistic body politic. Just think how nonsensical it would sound if he had said, “No matter our nationality, citizenship, migrant status, or if our visas are expired, we are all Americans first.” Simply put, no, “we” are not “all Americans” and dominant culture sure as hell does not treat everyone as though they were “all the same”. This tacky Americanism is a particularly malicious way to respond to a neo-Nazi attack, since neo-Nazis have a long history of attacking the “other people”, not those who are comfortably seen as integral to the nationalistic body politic.

“We” hardly need a newsflash to tell us that James Fields and his neo-Nazi and Klan brethren in the Nationalist Front are citizens of the U.S.A. By saying that “our” Americanism comes before anything else, Trump unifies “us” with the neo-Nazi terrorist and all his American partners who, there is no doubt, would be much more inclined to say, “We love our God and our Country and we’re proud of it,” than those of us on the left-wing of genuine anti-fascism, a significant proportion of us being (1) non-believers in the God of the billionaire Trump (that god which is Money), (2) haters of the system of nation-states which dislocates us from our loved ones, kills migrants, and is the basis of every modern war, (3) adequately aware of and versed in the history of fascist bourgeois nationalism and its mass psychology so as to be immune to all of the cues and triggers designed to induce the crocodile emotions of patriotism, and (4) ashamed, ashamed to be marshalled by this sexually predatory, fake-tanned old man into his subject and told what we must love and be proud of.

According to this way of thinking (which says, “We are all Americans first,”) our Americanism precedes, and is therefore more important and reigns supreme over the fact of whether, for example, we belong to a fascist “political party” or an antifascist one, whether we are actively working towards the orchestration of genocide or slated to be exterminated, whether we are perpetrators of hate-crime or victims, or whether we pay other people to produce untold sums of money for us or we work for other people to get paid hopefully enough to make ends meet. For a materially powerful person who is a representative of the ruling class to rhetorically marshal any of the latter categories into artificial unity with the former is to promise physical violence and annihilation. It is to predestine the elimination of “other people” and the prevention of an “Other” consciousness. It is to combine the promise of “We have no other people,” with the resolve to make it so in reality. It is a declaration of war on “Other” people, i.e. “alien” social elements, the ones who do not love the “God” of Trump, who do not love a piece of cloth, who do not see themselves as Americans first and foremost, who identify themselves in other ways instead, who have other priorities.

The fasces is symbolic of the fascist mentality.

The fasces, the symbol of the Vanguard America gang members seen in this photo and which was also carried by the murderous neo-Nazi James Fields, is a signifier of this idea that national identity should reign supreme in each individual’s psyche. A fasces is a bundle of sticks which stands for the notion that a nation’s citizenry are stronger when collectively bound together than as twigs which, taken individually, snap easily. As a symbol of national unity, the fasces represents the idea that class struggle within the nation is “divisive” and weakens it. By calling for the members of the national body politic to put their civic identity as “Americans” in a position of supremacy over whatever other affiliations they may have, including as members of socioeconomically, racially, or sexually oppressed classes, Trump — and the so-called “progressive” Democrats — attack class consciousness and endorse the fascist mentality.

In the nationalist utterance of Trump, “We are all Americans first”, we can also parse out a deeper significance to the placement of the word “all” in front of the word “American”. Its appearance here is to signify not only that “All of us are Americans”, but that “We are All-Americans.”

The term “All-American” is frequently employed to describe that which is either “composed wholly of American elements” or “representative or typical of the U.S. or its ideals” [x]. Like the somewhat antiquated term “Great-Russian”, which was “used formerly in distinguishing ethnic Russians from other constituent peoples of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire” [x], the term “All-American” has long been used to distinguish between those who have the traits of a “typical” American (white, Anglo-Saxon or Germanic heritage, Protestant, etc.) and those who are marked, wholly or partially, by some “alien” stigmata. By saying, “We are All-Americans,” Trump dog whistles a white nationalist conceptualization of what an “American” is and who “we” are.

This idea of “all-Americanism” is conveyed in the film The Good Shepherd, in the following bit of dialogue between two characters:

Joseph Palmi: We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the [N word], they got their music. What about you people Mr. Carlson, what do you have?

Edward: The United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting [x].

Several Urban Dictionary entries for “All-American” also detail the racist connotations of this word. Here is the top Urban Dictionary definition of “All-American” [x]:

A word that describes a certain type of ultra-conservative white person who lives in a small rural or suburban towns in middle America. This term is exclusively used by white people to describe their perfect vision of what they believe embodies a true American person. Whites fail to realize just how racist the term “All American” is. If only white people from middle America can be “All American”, that must mean that all the blacks, latinos, asians, native americans and mixed people can never fully be regarded as Americans by the oppressive white society. Think about it, if you are born black in this country, white people will call you “African American”. But the majority of black people born in here in America have never been to Africa and will never go there in their entire lifetime. Its really fucking racist. (Submitted by “thagoldenchild” on May 9, 2008)

Another popular definition for “All-American”:

A conformist who is blindly patriotic, votes Republican not because the values of the party are true to them, but because “everyone else is gay” or they’re scared the terrorists will kill them and does whatever anyone wants for them. All American males usually have blond buzz cuts and are tall, well built and stupid. All American girls will usually have long blond hair, and stupid. They can be of any class, but often tend to be richer, or at least born in a rich suburban family. Still, most rednecks are all American, too. (Submitted anonymously on January 23, 2005)

Shifting slightly, we move now from “all-Americans” to the next bit of the dog whistle: “Americans first”. This is a clear allusion to the “America First” slogan which was adopted by the Trump presidential election campaign in 2016, when he promised that it would be “the major and overriding theme” of his draconian capitalist regime [x]. The slogan harkens back to the “America First Committee”, which was a large anti-war group that petitioned to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War, rendered problematic by the presence of antisemitic and Nazi-sympathizing forces. A latter day “America First Committee” was formed in 1980 by Arthur Jones, a longtime neo-Nazi who took part in the infamous neo-Nazi marches in Illinois in 1978 after the American Civil Liberties Union won them the right to provoke Holocaust survivors by marching through their neighborhoods [x, x]. (Incidentally, the ACLU came under fire in connection to the neo-Nazi mayhem in Charlottesville for, under the pretense of protecting free speech, actually defending the right of the terrorist groups to publicly assemble in armed assault formations and immediately communicating misinformation to the public about the neo-Nazi vehicular assault on leftists that implied that it was accidental and provoked by rock-throwing, although the ACLU later later retracted this false claim [x, x]).

Part of what is significant here is that the latter day America First Committee is one of the founding members of the previously mentioned Aryan Nationalist Alliance, the umbrella organization composed of dozens of smaller Klan, neo-Nazi, and Christian Identity factions whose goal is to “unite the right”. According to a press release from another one of the co-founder groups, the Aryan Nationalist Alliance was formed on April 22, 2016 (two days after Adolf Hitler’s birthday, commonly memorialized by neo-Nazi groups). The Aryan Nationalist Alliance later changed its name to Nationalist Front and, in April 2017, Vanguard America joined the so-called Nationalist Front. Two out of the ten speakers who were slated to publicly address the crowds at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally are Nationalist Front members: Michael Hill and Matt Heimbach [x].

Below is the flyer for the “Unite the Right” rally showing the presence of two members of the Nationalist Front on the official list of speakers, which was shared on Twitter in June [x] by “Alt-Right” white nationalist head of the “National Policy Institute” Richard Spencer (who collaborated with Trump’s chief speechwriter Stephen Miller as members of the Duke Conservative Union at Duke University in 2007 [x]).

Michael Hill is the leader of the neo-Confederate “League of the South”, while Matt Heimbach is the leader of the “Traditionalist Worker Party”. Both the League of the South and the Traditionalist Worker Party are member organizations of the Nationalist Front. These two men, along with Jeff Schoep, “Commander” of the “National Socialist Movement” (the largest neo-Nazi organization in the United States) appear to be the main leaders of the Nationalist Front [x], although a press release published by the NSM indicates that the Nationalist Front is essentially Schoep’s brainchild; there it is noted that it was Schoep who “unveiled a Historic document detailing a plan for the Aryan Nationalist Alliance” (now renamed Nationalist Front).

Below is the press release, retrieved from “NSM Magazine Summer/Fall 2016”. NSM and the Nationalist Front seem to have done a half-assed job trying to delete references to Nationalist Front member groups like the “Aryan Terror Brigade”, probably realizing that this is not a good look for an organization that claims to “reject illegal, seditious and violent conduct as a model of political change” and be “dedicated to a peaceful process of gaining power”. References to Aryan Terror Brigade and several other founding groups listed in the original press release have been scrubbed from both the Nationalist Front website (nfunity.org) and an NSM web page relating the information about the “historic alliance formed by U.S. white nationalists”. On a similar note, NSM and their NF front organization appear to have made an effort to “go mainstream” and win more adherents by phasing out their use of the swastika and terms like “Aryan” in favor of symbols like the othala rune and terms like “Alt-Right” [x]. Nevertheless, the NSM website (nsm88.org) continues to host a PDF file of the “NSM Magazine Summer/Fall 2016” where these groups, which are obviously incompatible with the objective of bringing neo-Nazism into the mainstream, are listed as founders of Nationalist Front. The Southern Poverty Law Center also confirms this list of NF founders [x].

The press release also reveals some important facts about the composition of the Nationalist Front which the road rage racist killer James Fields and official speakers at the “Unite the Right” rally belong to. Among its founding member organizations we find numerous groups with penchants for racially-motivated terrorism and violent crime. Let’s just sample a few of these:

One is the so-called “Phineas Priesthood”. This is said by some to be more of a “meme” than an actual organization [x]; an ideology which is nothing but a glorified justification for committing racially-motivated murder. As one source puts it: “Phineas priests take their name from the biblical figure Phinehas in the book of Numbers, who is described as brutally murdering an Israelite man for having sex with a foreign woman, who he also kills. Members of the Phineas Priesthood — which people ‘join’ simply by adopting the views of the movement — are notoriously violent, and some adherents have been convicted of bank robberies, bombing abortion clinics, and planning to blow up government buildings” [x]. The fact that the Nationalist Front names the “Phineas Priesthood” as a founding member of the organization signals that the murdering of so-called “race-mixers” and “race-polluters” serves as an ideological point of reference for what the group hopes to achieve and the methods they are willing to employ as means to those ends.

Another Nationalist Front founding organization is the previously mentioned Aryan Terror Brigade. Members of the Aryan Terror Brigade were convicted of carrying out racist assaults on Muslim-looking people in 2013 [x]. The group is said to be a branch of Combat 18 [x, x], a British neo-Nazi group which claimed responsibility for the terrorist bombing campaign targeting Black British, South Asian, and LGBT communities in London which took place during the days surrounding April 20, 1999, killing three people and causing four others to lose limbs. A group called the “White Wolves”, an offshoot of Combat 18, also claimed responsibility for the bombings [x]. (Another Nationalist Front co-founder is listed as “White Wolves Invictus”).

“Aryan Strikeforce” is another Nationalist Front co-founder group which claims “Combat 18 International” affiliation, as shown on the VKontake profile of the group’s founder Joshua Michael Steever (“Hatchet”), who also founded Aryan Terror Brigade before being kicked out of it and has a history of making terroristic threats [x, x]. Strikeforce is the name of a Combat 18 publication which, before the London Nail Bomb attacks, declared that “The [only] answer is an international terror/sabotage campaign” [x, x]. Numerous members of Aryan Strikeforce were arrested in 2016 and 2017 and are said to have been amassing machine guns [x].

David Copeland, nicknamed “The London Nail Bomber”, was the only person convicted of carrying out the 1999 neo-Nazi bombings in London, claiming to have acted as a “lone wolf” [x]. In part by relying on the doctrine of “leaderless resistance”, neo-Nazi organizations can shift responsibility for all of their illegal actions onto rogue “lone wolves” and enjoy the protection of the capitalist state and “free speech”-defending liberals who back up their above-the-board activism and organizing which pretends to be strictly interested in legal activity. This is a sham pretense. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the nature of an organization founded by groups like “Aryan Terror Brigade” and “White Wolves Invictus”.

It’s worth expanding on one point here and noting that the London Nail Bomber was a member of another British neo-Nazi group, “coincidentally” also named “National Socialist Movement” (like “White Wolves”, the British NSM was also an offshoot of Combat 18 [x]). The British NSM was led by David Myatt, a man who is in turn widely acknowledged to have used various pseudonyms in leading a cult called the “Order of Nine Angles”, which embraces “traditional Satanism” and neo-Nazism, and advocates the practice of human sacrifice as a form of Hitlerian eugenics. In my post “What is Net-Centric Warfare?” from November 2016, I showed how the facelift given to neo-Nazism (by adopting the “Alt-Right” identity and using a cartoon frog called “Pepe” or “Kek” in place of a swastika) has borrowed heavily from Satanic strains of neo-Nazism in developing something called the “Cult of Kek”, which revolves around the belief in “meme magick” and the appearance of Pepe the Frog as a theophany of the Ancient Egyptian god Kek. This runs parallel to the neo-Nazi and U.S. military-linked “Temple of Set”, another Satanic cult appropriating from the mythology of Ancient Egypt.

This cryptic far-right “spirituality” seems to be further manifested by the fact that another keynote speaker at the “Unite the Right” rally was the eccentric eugenics advocate [x] Augustus Sol Invictus, currently a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida, who began making sensationalized headlines two years ago in part for claiming to have sacrificed a goat and drank its blood. “Sol Invictus” is said to identify as “pagan” [x]. Tellingly, comparative religion scholar Mattias Gardell notes in Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism that the eugenics-advocating “Order of Nine Angles” cult describes its brand of Satanism as a “militant paganism” [x] derived from the “solar cults of Albion”, i.e. sun-worshipping cults of ancient Britain. “Sol Invictus” means “unconquered sun”.

Another leading member of the Nationalist Front is Michael Tubbs, head of the Florida section of the League of the South. Tubbs was convicted in the 1990s for his involvement in a plot to start a race war by attacking African-American and Jewish-owned businesses [x, x]. Tubbs has since been released from prison and “was photographed [participating] in several brawls” during the “Unite the Right” rally [x].

The NSM is no stranger to terrorism itself. The case of Samuel James Johnson, a “former” NSM member (because it’s always a “former” member) who went on to found his own “Aryan Liberation Movement” went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 (see Johnson v. United States [x]). Despite plotting to conduct paramilitary-style attacks on a Mexican consulate and left-wing bookstores and assassinate “liberals” [x], Johnson was not tried as a terrorist but as an “armed career criminal”. Uncannily, lawyers presented arguments on behalf of the neo-Nazi on April 20, 2015. The Supreme Court’s decision seems to have been favorable to the neo-Nazi terrorist plaintiff, ruling that the Armed Career Criminal Act by which he had been sentenced to 15 years of prison was unconstitutional.

All of this goes to show that the fascist white supremacist who had conducted the deadly terrorist attack just prior to Trump’s speech last Saturday (August 12, 2017) was, in acting as a member of the Nationalist Front, therefore formally associated with, not only the NF member groups mentioned above which have well documented histories of and connections to terrorism, but also the neo-Nazi organization known as the America First Committee.

Donald Trump’s response to this situation was to invoke a neo-Nazi slogan, a neo-Nazi slogan which has been a neo-Nazi slogan, continuously, for at least 37 years. A neo-Nazi slogan which the Nationalist Front sub-group which the murderous fascist was seen standing in uniformed formation with, Vanguard America, has used in its own propaganda:

Trump’s response has also been to blame the victims of this terrorist attack, the political Left and to make “But not all…” type excuses for the attendees of a rally to defend monuments to Pro-Slavery Rebellion which was officially billed as having multiple speakers affiliated with the Nationalist Front, a group founded by people who openly pine for “an international terror campaign” and spiritual rewards for the act of murdering “race-polluters”.

In uttering the despicable words, “We are all-Americans First,” Trump has blown a dog whistle. When right-wing dogs hear those despicable words, what they understand is:

“You can’t say you a man. If you do, you’re filthy and abominable. And you can’t say you’re a man because if you do you’re like the beast that perishes.”

– Sun Ra

In this article, we will take a look at the life of the African-American musician Le Sony’r Ra (1914-1993), better known by his stage name, Sun Ra, and the opposition to war he exhibited throughout his life, through the contextual prism of current events.

These days, it’s easy to fall under the impression that intensification of imperialist war barely disguised as a humanitarian ‘last resort’ is not just inevitable, but what’s necessary, correct, and just. Across the media and the political spectrum, the supposed righteousness of state-sponsored, socially-sanctioned, extrajudicial killing is being beaten like a drum loud and louder into our collective mind. You’d think maybe ‘we’ would’ve learned something after the debacle of the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’, but no.

Last Friday the 13th, a mass casualty incident in Paris succeeded in arousing a widespread outpouring of proclamations of sympathy for victims of terrorism and, perhaps more tellingly, belief in and solidarity with ‘universal’ values, which recent bloodbaths of a similar nature in Ankara, Beirut, and elsewhere failed to elicit, the saturation of social media with tricolore profile pics testifying to this fact. Conveniently ignoring the massacre in Paris on October 17th, 1961 of perhaps well over 200 North African immigrants, the selectively amnesic capitalist mass media has widely and erroneously billed the Paris mass casualty incident of November the 13th as “the deadliest violence to strike France since WWII.” Sadly, we’ll never know the precise number of those murdered by Parisian police on October 17th, 1961 since, even when murderous imperialists do acknowledge that they’ve committed crimes against humanity, they “don’t do body counts.” The incident inspired ‘Socialist’ French president François Hollande to declare a ‘state of emergency’, strengthening not only the repressive state apparatus, but also the ideological state apparatuses (by giving the state the power to ‘control’ media). Since then, the ‘state of emergency’ has been extended for at least three more months, the president is calling for reforms to the constitution, and the government has even gone so far as to announce that it will be dispensing with the European Convention on Human Rights. (But don’t worry; human rights lawyers and NGO industrialists assure us that only non-fundamental, alienable, and violable so-called ‘rights’ like due process, privacy, and freedom of movement will be affected. It’s not a carte-blanche to do “whatever”; “human rights violations will simply be judged with more flexibility.” And plenty of other states have already long undone the adage that all rights are “interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible.”)

Meanwhile, in America, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush: everyone agrees, it’s time to contain, degrade, and ultimately destroy these Islamist mofos, they tell ya hwat. Turn on Fox News and you’ll hear folks like Tucker Carlson, Geraldo Rivera, and all the rest of those propagandist pieces of shit railing on about the need to annihilate the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.’ Tune in to MSNBC and you can hear the same thing, interspersed with timid warnings about why it’s bad to scapegoat migrants. Self-proclaimed anti-imperialists cheerlead the Russian bombing campaign in Syria, and anarchists praise Kurdish fighters, who now collaborate with the U.S. No matter where you stand, it’s virtually never a question of whether or not to wage war, but howaggressive ‘we’ must be in waging war.

On November 20th, 2015, one week after the mass casualty incident in Paris, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution demanding the entire world join in on the action, seemingly indicating that the ‘War on Terror’ may be escalated to heretofore untold epic proportions and comfortingly promising of a temporary surge in mass casualty incidents which will in the long term reduce the number and frequency of mass casualty incidents.

“This world, with American leadership, can and must come together to destroy [ISIS and Al-Qaeda].” –Bernie Sanders at the 2nd Democratic Debate

It was a little easier to be anti-war about a decade ago; with George W. Bush in charge and waging a war in Iraq that was a bit more blatantly based on criminal pretexts, a more active social movement against militarism meant that there were more sizeable numbers of folks with whom one could link up and plot disruptions of the war machine. In certain milieus it seemed everybody loathed ‘Dubya’. There was a popular meme from those years called “same shit, different asshole,” featuring George W. Bush juxtaposed with Adolf Hitler. I myself managed to, using black permanent marker, draw Hitler moustaches on a poster-sized photo of President Bush which one of my high school teachers, a one time Republican representative in state legislature, kept in his classroom. Hilarious to me at the time, the teacher didn’t seem to notice this unsubtle, perhaps juvenile détournement, since it stayed that way for months. But then, the managers of U.S. Empire elected a new approach public relations: white power in black face. Nobel peace prizes delivered by drones simmered down the anti-war movement quite a bit, but it wasn’t long before the cult of LaRouche had its Hitler Obama posters out. Of course, comparisons to Hitler and Nazism are far from cutting-edge. From reductio ad Hitlerum to Godwin’s Law, Nazifying one’s enemies has, for over 60 years, been a convenient and sometimes powerful rhetorical device; one that even the U.S. government itself employs in propaganda against its current boogeyman, an apparent enemy whose mediatized wickedness is bordering on, if not surpassing, comic book levels.

In an article entitled “The Islamic State and the Cynicism of Nazi Analogies”, Natasha Lennard highlights a fact which we will reiterate here: “the subtext of any Nazi comparison by a US official is to invoke a moral obligation to engage militarily.” Nevermind that the United States of America was the primary exporter of eugenics to Germany, or that American industrialists were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler, that its most beloved amusement park was the brainchild of a goddamn Nazi, that the US actively deported German Jews and would-be Holocaust survivors to Europe, and only entered into the Second World War as a result of a rival imperialist power’s attack on what had less than fifty years earlier been an independent country which Theodore Roosevelt declared to be arbitrarily granted to the USA by ‘manifest destiny.’ WWII was ‘The Good War’, the ultimate just war, “a morally clear-cut conflict between Good and Evil.”

It’s not exactly hard to sympathize with the draft dodgers of the genocidal Vietnam War, but to evade conscription during World War II? That could potentially be scandalous. Surely everyone has a duty to stop fascism. “No Gook ever called me a Nigger,” a popular Vietnam era slogan went; but plenty of Krauts did call the local African diaspora, whom they subjected to forced sterilization, ‘Rhineland bastards.’ Evil shit indeed. Perhaps there was no other time when it was more difficult to be anti-war in the USA than during the Second World War. Though the First World War had its Espionage and Sedition Acts, it was a blatantly inter-imperialist war. But out of the First World War emerged the Bolshevik Revolution, and so the former revolutionary defeatists had some semblance of a stake to defend in the Second. And recent and current U.S. wars have been fought by an all volunteer military, so it doesn’t take a lot of guts to refuse to fight these days.

Le Sony’r Ra, better known by his stage name, Sun Ra, nicknamed Sonny, leader of the Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra, is best remembered for his prolific jazz career and pioneering role in the genesis of afrofuturism. However, he was also a conscientious objector to war, for which he is far less remembered. Little public record of this episode of Sun Ra’s life existed until the publication of John Szwed’s 1998 biography Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (not to be confused with the 1974 blaxploitation sci-fi film Space is the Place, which stars Ra). Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, Sun Ra was drafted into the US military in 1942. This marked the beginning of an ordeal which would eventually lead to his jailing in Alabama and internment in a forced labor camp in the middle of a forest in northwestern Pennsylvania. Known as Camp No. 48, it was part of a theocratic gulag system administered by the Civilian Public Service (CPS) from 1941 to 1947, consisting in total of 152 camps and smaller urban ‘units’ across the United States.

Sun Ra couched his resistance to participation in the war in Christian rhetoric, despite lacking membership in any church. This was probably the best bet for anyone seeking recognition as a conscientious objector, as morally-grounded exemptions from forced transformation into a human killing machine were, since the First World War, effectively limited to followers of the ‘historic peace churches’: Quakers and Anabaptist sects (i.e., Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Schwarzenau Brethren). Furthermore, it was not until the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Gillette v. United States that the possibility would be opened up of conscientious objection based outside of affiliation with a “well-recognized religious sect or organization whose existing creed or principles forbid its members to participate in war in any form” (i.e., ‘historic peace churches’–Quakers or Anabaptists). Gillette called his religious belief ‘Humanism.’ The ‘historic peace churches’ hold state-sanctioned violence as contrary to Christian morality. As religious movements, they were originally conceived in Northern Europe and in North America are rooted in overwhelmingly white congregations. This effectively barred African-Americans from being conscientious objectors. As Sun Ra would note during his draft ordeal, “[my case] has embittered me to such an extent that I am wondering whether a Negro has the right to be a Christian or whether it is even remotely possible that any white man can ever be expected to deal fairly with my race.” During the First World War, conscripted members of these congregations were forced either into ‘noncombatant’ military service or prison, where some were tortured and extrajudicially killed. It was the leaders of these churches, who had united to form the National Council for Religious Conscientious Objectors, and shortly thereafter merged with the Civilian Service Board to become the National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO), in response to the Selective Service and Training Act of 1940, who actually concocted the plan to set up a network of forced labor camps under their control as a more desirable alternative to either ‘noncombatant’ military service or imprisonment. Camp No. 48, where Sun Ra was interned, was administrated by the Church of the Brethren.

Initially (and surprisingly, since he was not affiliated with a church), the government recognized Sun Ra as a conscientious objector, and the local draft board informed him that he would be granted the right to be detained in a remote forced labor camp as an alternative to military service. But for Sun Ra the musician, the church-run civilian gulag was no more desirable an alternative than ‘noncombatant’ military service or prison. As he appealed this decision, he was in communication with pacifist organizations and the National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO), whose members were more sympathetic to his case than those of the local draft board. In one of these correspondences, he writes:

My orchestra and the management of it, the arranging and composing, the rehearsing, the developing of potential talent, that is my work and the only earthly pleasure I love. To separate me from music would be more cruel than standing me by a wall and shooting me. I think I would prefer the latter. I hope you understand why I am so staunchly against being in any kind of camp where one must live according to certain rules and regulations and requirements. If it were possible to be in civilian life and be of help I would appreciate greatly this consideration.

In addition to his dedication to his orchestra and his religious objections to killing, Le Sony’r Ra was financially supporting one of his relatives through his musical work, and he was in a poor state of physical health, which made the kind of manual labor required at the work camp dangerous for him. Nevertheless (and despite having been cited Paragraph 652.11 of the Selective Service Regulations which the NSBRO had informed Sun Ra supported his exemption), the all-white local draft board ordered Herman Poole Blount to render himself to Camp No. 48, approximately 850 miles from his home, on December 8, 1942. When Sun Ra informed the draft board that he “would probably not show up at the designated time,” they threatened him with jail. Reporting back to the NSBRO how the local board had handled his appeal, he writes, “Gandhi, Stalin, Christ, and a lot of people who fought for right know of jail.”

As Szwed explains in The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1998), Sun Ra was shunned by most of his family for his refusal to go and fight the Axis powers. But Ra quite rightly identified the fascist-imperialist ideology as occupying not only Europe and Asia, but also the Deep South he lived in. In his correspondences with the NSBRO, he admonishes the local draft board for “smack[ing] of Hitlerism,” and snatches the wig off of domestic inequities when he writes, “Unfortunately, I am not living in a part of the U.S. but more a section which seems a member of the Axis and which is determined that no Negro will ever receive justice.”

On December 2, he received a sympathetic note from J. N. Weaver, head of the Camp Section of the National Service Board for Religious Objectors, telling him that he would be given another physical examination when he reached the camp, and that he would be discharged if he was not physically qualified. He concluded, “I suggest that you report to camp and we shall do everything in our power to see that you get justice.”

On December 8 Sonny failed to appear at CPS Camp No. 48. A week later they came after him, and took him away to holding rooms set aside for malingerers and subversives at the old post office building not far from his house. His family, still humiliated and angry, refused to have anything to do with him. Only his brother Robert’s wife and daughter came to visit him, where they found him spending his days writing letters to his bedridden great-aunt, the FBI, and President Roosevelt.

One can hardly fault Sun Ra for declining to travel across the country for a physical examination. Three counties southeast of Birmingham, Alabama lies Macon County, where the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments had begun ten years earlier, in 1932, and would continue for another thirty years, until 1972. These experiments, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on rural and impoverished African-American men, are remembered as some of the sickest, most fucked up cases of unethical human experimentation carried out by the U.S. government. Black sharecroppers were left with untreated syphilis treatment so that Public Health Service researchers could observe the deadly effects of the curable disease. When some of these human guinea pigs were, like Herman P. Blount, drafted into the military during World War II, draft boards began notifying the men to take penicillin treatment for the disease following physical examinations which were a routine part of induction, only to be prevented from doing so by the Public Health Service.

After he was arrested, Sun Ra remained in jail for 39 days until he was forcibly relocated to Camp 48 in desolate Marienville, Pennsylvania. Szwed writes that “camp life was a daily routine of forestry work followed by evenings of rest, discussions of religious matters, and reading. (…) The camp at Marienville was not segregated, and for the first time in his life [Sun Ra] had daily contact with white people, and he joined in the nightly discussions of the evils of war and the morality of resistance.” Arriving at Camp 48 in early February 1943, Sun Ra’s health rapidly deteriorated under the forced manual labor regime. “Suffering heart palpitations, headaches, backaches, stomachaches, and (…) paralysis on his left side,” he complained to the camp director until he was finally granted medical examinations and the camp’s doctor and psychiatrist both “recommended him for immediate discharge for reasons of physical disability.” At last, in late March 1943, he was set free, classified as a bona fide conscientious objector.

A little over a year after his ordeal had begun, Sun Ra wrote again to the National Service Board of Religious Objectors to request a subscription to their newsletter. “Certain of a sympathetic audience,” Szwed writes, “he went on to talk of morality, and the role of teacher he was assuming in civilian life:”

At all my band rehearsals I talk to the fellows and try to make them see the point of knowing and admitting to oneself whether he is right or wrong and how fine it is to know the ecstasy of being right. Due to many aspects which discourage, the young Afro-American often loses initiative and other valuable principles of life

I never speak of conscience, which makes them listen more eagerly as they think I will. I am beginning to wonder if conscience isn’t like intellect–you either have it or you don’t. The majority of people in the world don’t think, they dodge social problems and many other things which puncture their ego. Is it because they don’t have the brain? Some of them, maybe? Then what about the conscience? … Sometimes I think it is an abnormality to want to help others and to care about anything but self. The world is so selfish that sometimes I don’t care whether I live or die. I’ve tried to be selfish and unthinking, conscienceless, but I can’t.

Since the U.S. military no longer recruits via conscription, the law regarding conscientious objectors is, for now, seemingly irrelevant. But this is actually not such a fortunate thing as it might seem, as what it truly signifies is that there is a large pool of dumbasses who think that Call of Duty or Ghost Recon gameplay and plotlines resemble reality or that spending a couple years as a conscienceless killing machine is a great way to “pay for college” and “get professional experience”, or more desirable than working in a low wage job or being homeless or even suicide.

Unlike another famous so-called, would-be ‘conscientious objector’ named Bernie Sanders, Sun Ra was, legally speaking, an actual conscientious objector. This is because U.S. law on conscientious objectors, clarified by the previously mentioned Gillette v. United States (1971) case, holds that conscientious objectors must be opposed to war in any form. In other words, they have to oppose all war in general, and not only one or more particular war(s). While Sanders refused to fight in the Vietnam War, he later went on to endorse wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Gaza, and now, as if that wasn’t enough to permanently tarnish his reputation as some kind of antiwar icon, displays his warmonger credentials by proclaiming that “[the] military option [against Iran] is always a possibility,” and hypocritically calls on the young people of the Middle East to fight as U.S. surrogates in Syria and Iraq while at the same time claiming to “get very upset at people who are so prepared to send other people’s kids into that war.” Sun Ra, on the other hand, had a lasting conscience, exemplified by work from his later years such as “Nuclear War” (1982).

Late 1942 and early 1943 were surely a transformative time in the life of Herman “Sonny” P. Blount. His avant-garde efforts to assert his civil and human rights and to resist war during those years deserve more recognition.

If you were not familiar with Sun Ra or this episode in his life, then you have never read Raving Radicals Bathed in Blax, my 21st century proletarian novel which is also a satirical geopolitical thriller, because in it Sun Ra makes numerous appearances. In Raving Radicals, I have taken a few creative liberties. Unlike the real Sun Ra, who claimed to be from Saturn, the Sun Ra in Raving Radicals inhabits Rátopia, another ringed gas giant in an alien planetary system orbiting around a star called Szulo. Rátopia is similar to TrES-2b, the blackest planet ever discovered, except that it is even darker than TrES-2b and it has not been discovered; this is why it is called “the darkest planet unknown to Man.” Raving Radicals is a novel about jumping beyond the realm of possibility. Because mainstream political thought has pushed proletarian revolutionary change beyond the realm of possibility, it is necessary to embrace the fantastic, to realize the impossible.

“There is a message in all of my music. It’s all about people doin’ somethin’ else other than what they have done. Because what they have done is the possible, and the world the way it is today is the results of the possible that they did.” – Sun Ra

Fantastic literature, in the view of Bulgarian-French literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, is a present-oriented genre, constantly at risk of vanishing into thin air because it is, in essence, the state of hesitation; it is the occupation of the liminal mental space before one has decided whether the happenings of a tale are feasible or infeasible in relation to a particular worldview. Rather than being an autonomous genre, the Fantastic is situated in between the past-oriented Strange, or the supernatural explained (into which it dissolves when bizarre happenings are better explained in terms previously known conceptions) and the future-oriented Marvelous, or supernatural accepted (which absorbs it when the outlandish overpowers the senses to the extent that a new worldview must be admitted). Raving Radicalsas fantastic literatureis thus highly extroverted towards elements of conspiracist ideation, from weather modification to melanin theory, posited within a constellation of more conventional social facts to build up this tension. In this particular passage, one of the book’s protagonists, Tisha Ulroy, has just arrived in the Uhuru Union, a Pan-Sub-Saharan Africanist proletarian state, to set up a diplomatic mission on behalf of the Socialist Rromani Republic of the Banat, a communist Gypsy state in Eastern Europe which she previously helped to establish along with her comrades of the Radical Book Club, an ultra left-wing activist group.

Eventually the bus went beyond the outskirts, into the countryside. Afternoon faded into night. Many celestial bodies could be seen. The Dog Star, or Sirius–as it is sometimes known–shone darkly upon the savannah as the speeding metallic block traversed it.

The Dogon members of the Uhuru delegation began to recount with pride to Tisha how the elders of their tribe had passed down knowledge to them of the star system Sirius. Dogon cosmology had been a curiosity to Western scholars since the early 20th century, when French ethnologist and honorary Dogon tribesman Marcel Griaule had brought the tribe’s inexplicable savoir of the star system to the world’s attention. Improvements in observatory and space exploration technologies would later confirm Griaule’s findings, demonstrating that a Dogon hogon, or ritual elder, was able to accurately anticipate the layout of the Sirius star system. Some of the Dogon claimed that the source of this astral knowledge was none other than Sun Ra, the alien jazz musician come from the ancient dream of a Black man via Saturn.

The Twa members of the Uhuru delegation disputed the Dogons’ claim. One Twa man instead attempted to convince Tisha that Sun Ra had actually been a 20th century African-American man who had fabricated his extraterrestrial backstory in a dissociative response to torture inflicted upon him near Tuskegee, Alabama during imprisonment for draft dodging during the Second World War. This first Twa man’s assertion was, however, disputed by another Twa man who claimed that, though Sun Ra was a 20th century African-American man, he was the descendent of a Dogon hogon. Furthermore, Le Sony’r Ra’s abundant melanocyte receptors, not to mention his copious amounts of the consciousness-altering hormone melanin, had allowed him to perform ancestor communion at will.

How could they have possibly known these facts? The Twa people, known for their supple pineal glands, which were rumored to be immune to calcification, were said to be adepts in the art of liminal epistemology, able to abstract invisibility from the visible. It was thus that they knew much about late stage capitalist barbarism, and formed well articulated critiques of it, without ever needing to leave the rainforests.